This new episode focuses on one underlying core belief of our culture, that is, that man has dominion over the Earth, and contrasts it with the underlying belief of most of the world’s indigenous tribes, which is that man belongs to the Earth. All of the cultures of the world ascribe to one of these two fundamental beliefs, and this underlying principle, perhaps more than any other, shapes the culture and determines it’s destiny.

As we contemplate the unfolding nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Global Climate Change, and the destruction of the last wild habitats on Earth, we should ask ourselves, “Where did we go wrong?” The Living Earth Connection explores this question by taking a critical look at the culture that has so dramatically altered the face of the Earth over the past 10,000 years, in hopes of revealing the ideological errors that prevent us from living sustainably and within the carrying capacity of the planet on which we all reside,

I hope you’ll tune in to The Living Earth Connection on KMUD, 91.9 MHz Garberville, 88.1 Eureka at 9:30AM pacific time, or catch it streaming live @ http://www.kmud.org or anytime on the KMUD archive. To listen to, or download, past episodes of The Living Earth Connection, check out The Living Earth Connection blog

I have two gigs coming up in October. On Weds. Oct 9 I’ll play at Persimmons Garden Gallery in Redway, and two days later, you can hear me in Arcata at Moonrise Herbs. Here’s a taste of what you’ll hear:

I tell people that I do what Syd Barret did that got him kicked out of Pink Floyd. That is, I stare off into space, play one note all night long, and drool on the floor. Sound entertaining? Come on out and see for yourself.

Humboldt County’s monied elite has had enough of poor people. The people who profited the most from the flood of narco-dollars into the county have decided that poor people are unsightly, and must be punished. Currently leading the assault against the poor is Eureka businessman, landlord, and banker, Rob Arkley.

Eureka, CA Businessman Rob Arkley

They don’t mind that the whole county has been transformed into a giant drug ghetto thanks to two generations of drug-dealers who have driven up rent and housing costs by turning every square foot of residential space into a grow scene. No, our county’s landlords don’t mind collecting money from people who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for work, but when it comes to people who don’t have jobs, aren’t looking for work, and don’t pay rent, that’s another story.

Thanks to these drug-war profiteers, we now basically have three kinds of people here in Humboldt County. We have landlords. We have drug dealers, and we have poor people, some working, some not, some with housing, some without. They’re all wretched. They’re all disgusting in their own way, and they all cause way more problems than they are worth.

We may produce some of the world’s best marijuana, but when it comes to people, Humboldt County produces, and attracts, the human equivalent of ditch-weed. Rich or poor, you’ll find an abundance of sketchy, dishonest, and generally undesirable people at every income level in Humboldt County. With such an abundance of small-minded opportunists, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Humboldt County has become a cesspool of greed, exploitation and ugliness, and as tends to happen in cesspools, the scum rises to the top, and the sludge sinks to the bottom, trapping a layer of stagnant swill between them, all contaminated with the same toxic culture, and all slowly choking to death on their own filth.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s the truth. From the genocide of the Native Americans to the environmental destruction wrought by the gold rush and the wholesale liquidation of the old-growth forests, right up to our modern marijuana based economy, the entire history of Humboldt County has been a story of bad people doing awful things for the very worst of reasons. It’s a bottom-feeders paradise, and it produces some of the grossest scum, the rankest swill, and the most pathetic sludge you’ll ever have the displeasure of meeting.

Now that the marijuana money has started to dry up, Rob Arkley, one of the scummiest of our local scum, wants to see if we can drive poor people out of Humboldt County by closing down the last of Humboldt County’s soup kitchens, shelters and public rest-rooms. So, this is how we begin the grisly business of cannibalizing each other. The scum devour the sludge. The sludge leeches off the swill, and the swill sucks up to the scum. There are no “good guys” here. It’s the bad vs the ugly, the ugly vs the sick, and the sick infecting everyone.

I mean, what is a merchant or a landlord but another scumbag who wants your money. They don’t want to work for a living. They want to use their money to extract money from you. They obviously have enough money for their own needs, plus they have a bunch of merchandise they don’t need, or an extra building or property that they hope to make even more money from. When they see desperately poor people all around them, all they can think about is how that poverty interferes with their greed. It’s disgusting, and when you see what they offer as wages to their employees and what they charge their tenants for rent, you’ll want to slit their greedy little throats. At least I do.

The fact that Rob Arkley is alive today testifies to the extremely tolerant nature of Humboldt County’s poor. I wouldn’t blame the poor and homeless one bit if they burned Old Town Eureka to the ground, or Downtown Garberville for that matter. The county’s poor and homeless have shown remarkable restraint, under the circumstances. If you ask me, perhaps more than is warranted. It seems to me that the poor spend too much energy fighting among themselves and ripping each other off, when they could be vandalizing private property and murdering landlords who deserve it. Really, if the business community has declared war on the poor, the least the poor can do is return the favor.

We have about 2,000 homeless people in Humboldt County in the dead of winter, and we have about one-hundred beds available in shelters, a couple of public rest-rooms in Eureka, and a couple of places where people can get a free meal, and those kitchens only operate a few days a week. The vast majority of the county’s poor, get no help from any of those services.

The “social safety net” has been a joke in this country for decades. We don’t have a social safety net. We have poverty. We have poor people with nowhere to go and no prospects for the future. The handful of people who take pity on them are overwhelmed. Donations of food and clothing only go so far, and since most of that comes from private donors, the best that the scum at the top can do is vilify the last decent and compassionate people in Humboldt County in an attempt to stop them from helping the county’s most needy.

It’s a scummy scheme, schemed up by the scum at the top of the cesspool. The ones who got there by sucking up narco-dollars through overpriced rentals, sleazy land contracts and bogus business deals. Now that there are fewer narco-dollars to suck up, they blame the poor, but they are too cheap to hire enough cops to arrest them all, or build enough prisons to house them all.

In fact, the only reason the rich scumbags in Humboldt County got rich on the first place, was because there just aren’t enough cops to catch them in their crimes either. Humboldt county is a big place with lots of places to hide criminal activity. That has been the key to our economic growth for at least the last 40 years. That’s what allowed the marijuana industry to grow and flourish here despite a nationwide crackdown that landed millions of people in prison with stiff mandatory minimum sentences.

Now, we witness a nationwide effort to criminalize poverty, led by scumbags like Rob Arkley in every city in America. Unfortunately, the more we criminalize poverty, the more we will find poverty hiding out in Humboldt County. Maybe we should think twice before we piss it off.

This Saturday and Sunday, September 21 and 22, folks in Northern California will have a chance to hear me play electric didgeridoo for free at the 40th annual North Country Fair on the Plaza in Arcata.

Get there early though, because I’m the first act on the North Stage, playing from 10:30-11:35AM, both days.

North Country Fair is my favorite local festival. It includes lots of great music on two stages, a samba parade, and the famous “All Species Parade” led by animal themed kinetic sculptures followed by revelers in animal costumes and puppets of all kinds.

They also have the best of our local craft artists, festive food, and information booths for local non-profits. Besides playing at the festival, I’ll be manning a booth for KMUD all weekend.

I love North Country Fair for many reasons. First, North Country Fair is a free event. It costs nothing to attend because the costs of putting on the festival are born by the craft artists and food venders. Anyone can come and enjoy the fair, whether they have money to spare or not, and people who have money, can spend it on handmade crafts, clothes and food, which supports local artists, and helps build Humboldt County’s economic diversity.

Second, North Country Fair pays all of the musicians who perform at the festival. It’s not much, but each performer, not each act, but each performer, gets paid $10 for appearing on-stage at North Country Fair. That is a token of appreciation for the work that these artists put into their acts.

When you listen to a live musical act, you enjoy the fruits of years of training and practice, months of rehearsal, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of instruments and equipment, not to mention the courage to get up on-stage and the energy it takes to pour themselves out for an audience.

Too many local festivals, (like the big one at the beginning of the Summer in SoHum) pay big bucks for a headline act, but expect local musicians to work for free. At the same time, they charge admission to the festival, even though local craft artists pay the expenses of putting it on, and volunteers provide most of the labor for free.

Yes, the folks who put on North Country Fair (The Same Old People) may not make much money themselves, (which comes from beer, wine and t-shirt sales) but they provide an excellent example of how a community non-profit should operate. The Same Old People don’t own a world-class concert hall, but they know how to support the arts in a small rural community.

I got a lot of feedback on my most recent letter to the editor regarding the Southern Humboldt Community Park, almost all of it positive, so I decided to “double-dip” on the SoHum Community Park issue this week.

I found it especially gratifying that Dennis Huber mentioned my letter on his KMUD radio show, Monday Morning Magazine. I’ve got nothing against Dennis. In fact, I like him, or at least I want to like him, and I enjoy listening to his radio show. I mean, I’ve never met him, and I’m not sure I would recognize him if I saw him, but he does put together a good show, and he obviously puts a lot of work into it.

I think Monday Morning Magazine is one of the best shows on KMUD, and it provides us with a good example of what community radio should be. I don’t always agree with Dennis, but I know he means well, and that he undertakes his work for the Community Park with the same spirit of generosity and civic duty as he does his radio show. I just think that in this case, his generosity is misplaced.

On the other hand, my motivations for writing a letter to the editor in defense of wild blackberries at the park are entirely selfish. I love wild blackberries, and I especially love the blackberry patch that is targeted for replacement with AstroTurf ball fields. Those blackberries are especially delicious. They ripen later in the season than other local blackberries, providing an abundant source of sweet fruit well into September. Convenient parking, easy access and a nearby port-a-potty also contribute to making that blackberry patch an especially attractive community asset, and one that I personally utilize quite a bit.

My self-interest aside, I think the community park board’s alleged concern for the well being of this community’s young people is disingenuous. I think they are using young people as a cover for their plans, just like they used local craft artists as a cover for their plans to move Summer Arts and Music Festival to the park. Moving Summer Arts and Music Festival to the community park won’t help local craft artists at all. It might help the Mateel turn the only decent craft show in SoHum, into a music and marijuana festival subsidized by local craft artists, like they’ve been doing ever since the Reggae Wars, but it won’t help craft artists one bit. The park board would have known this, had they bothered to ask any local craft artists about it.

As I pointed out in my letter, Wilhelm Reich would argue, and I agree, not having a baseball field and not playing Little-League baseball would actually be a blessing to SoHum’s young people. Reich pointed out, I think correctly, that the serious global problems we face, like fascism, technological warfare, slavery, oppression and the environmental crisis, are symptoms of a sick culture, not a flaw in human nature, and that those problems can only be solved by changing our culture, not by the development of new technology, or the expenditure of capital.

Thus far, we have completely failed, as a culture, to address the underlying causes of the environmental crisis. If your generation couldn’t stop the conversion of the natural world into garbage, pollution and disease, and instead only accelerated it, what makes you think your kids will be able to solve those problems, especially if you saddle them with the same suicidal culture that you were born into?

I know that here in SoHum, we like to pretend that we’re not part of the dominant culture. We think that because we smoke marijuana instead of drinking martinis, and watch John Stewart instead of Bill O’Reilly, we’re part of an “alternative culture”, but those are just two sides of the same coin, minted from the same bankrupt currency. Just because competitive team sports play a big role in the culture that wrecked the natural world, that doesn’t mean that competitive team sports have any role in a culture capable of saving the natural world.

When it comes right down to it, all we really have to offer kids is a bad example and a degraded, overpopulated planet. Considering the enormous challenges we have foisted upon the younger generation, not having a baseball field is the least of their problems.

No, people don’t build ball fields to help children. Instead, parents remember ball fields from their childhood, and build them for themselves. Then they teach their kids to play baseball, buy them bats, balls, gloves and uniforms, and drive their kids to Little League, whether they want to go or not, because it makes them feel like superior parents, and gives them the opportunity to live vicariously through their children. Really, in a world dominated by the effects of Global Climate Change, the last thing we need is another excuse for rural parents to drive their kids around.

Besides being culturally regressive, ball fields at the community park would be bad for the environment, bad for kids, and bad for blackberry enthusiasts like me, but who would benefit from developing the park in this way? Obviously, this project would put money in the pockets of contractors, manufacturers of AstroTurf, retailers of sporting goods and uniforms, and big oil companies who will happily sell rural parents even more planet destroying fossil fuels to drive their doomed offspring all over creation. Besides that, plenty of people around here think like big oil companies, and expect to profit from this project in the long run.

These people don’t care that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They don’t give a fuck about building a sustainable culture from the ground up, and they don’t care about your kid’s future either. All they care about is money, and getting as much of it out of the land around here as they can. Those are the people who expect to reap the most profits from developing the community park.

Real-estate agents, developers and bankers have plenty of reasons to encourage destructive, unsustainable development in SoHum. Investors and businessmen, like the ones who have denuded our hillsides, diverted our creeks and killed off our wildlife with pesticides for their mega-grows also have plenty of reasons to support expensive, man-made, middle-class amenities at the community park, and all of those reasons contain a dollar sign and a decimal point.

There’s a name for the kind of development going on at the community park, and it happens all over America. They call it gentrification. Gentrification doesn’t build community, it undermines community. Gentrification doesn’t make a place a better place to live, gentrification makes it a more expensive place to live. Gentrification doesn’t help young people, it makes the place too expensive for young people to afford, and gentrification doesn’t attract artists or cultural creatives, it drives them out. To replace them, gentrification attracts vapid, greedy, status-conscious yuppies who haven’t had an original thought in their entire lives.

That’s what the Southern Humboldt Community Park is all about: driving poor people and young people, as well as the last of the artists and cultural creatives, out of the community, and replacing them with stupid, bloodsucking yuppies who will consume what’s left of our natural beauty, leaving nothing but garbage, pollution and ugliness in their wake. Yes, the Southern Humboldt Community Park Board seeks to uproot the thorny, unmanageable, self-reliant, generous and sweet individuals who currently thrive here, and replace them with a phony, toxic, and expensive imitation of suburban middle-class affluence in order to help the richest and greediest among us acquire more money.

Winston Churchill once said, “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” I’m sure people haven’t gotten any smarter in the last half-century, and neither has democracy. I know some people still think that democracy is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I sure don’t see the evidence of it. Really, what has democracy done for you lately?

Do you ever remember a time when democracy worked? I sure don’t. Would we be in the mess we’re in if democracy really worked? Face it; elections don’t solve anything. They never have and they never will. Elections didn’t stop sectarian violence in Iraq. Elections didn’t stabilize Afghanistan, and elections didn’t satisfy Egyptian protesters.

Here in this country, elections didn’t stop the Vietnam war, prevent the invasion of Iraq, or stop the bank bailout. Despite the massive grassroots mobilization that put Obama in the White House, not only does the prison at Guantanamo Bay remain open, but the government now claims the right to kill US citizens anywhere in the world without trial, and the NSA listens to all of our phone calls.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will be arrested for simple possession of marijuana this year, and Federal agents continue to raid state sanctioned medical marijuana dispensaries, despite the fact that over 80% of Americans favor the legalization of marijuana as medicine, and a majority of Americans favor legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes.

Income inequality continues to grow, along with poverty, homelessness, and prison populations, as the rich help themselves to more and more, while the rest of us fight over what few crumbs they leave behind. Does that sound like democracy is working?

Clearly at the national level, democracy has failed us, but what about at the local level? I sure haven’t seen much evidence of democracy working at the local level either. Whether we’re talking about mayors, city councils, county supervisors, or even the boards of directors of community non-profit organizations, I’ve seen plenty of corruption, cynical political manipulation and pandering to a monied minority at every level of democracy, haven’t you?

If you think you know of someplace where democracy seems to be working, I encourage you to get more involved. It won’t take long before you find the disaffected, oppressed and silenced factions, the two-faced hypocrisy, and the clique that operates with impunity, using “democracy” as a fig leaf. I guarantee it.

Yes, democracy has failed us completely, but we sure don’t let that stop us from spending gobs of money on it. On the contrary, “democracy” has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry. Besides the billions of dollars that get spent directly election campaigns, thousands of “activists” use the obvious failure of democracy to raise more money to help “reform” democracy, and somehow “return the power to the people”, as if the people ever had any power in this democracy.

Despite their best efforts, the environmental crisis only gets worse, economic oppression and injustice continue unabated, violence and warfare escalate while civil-rights and the social safety-net steadily erode. But hey, we still have democracy, and since you have the right to vote, you only have yourself to blame, right?

Every two or four years, a new crop of candidates promises to make big changes and to “put the people back in charge of government”, but as soon as they get elected, it’s back to business as usual. How long has this been going on? Only 250 years or so. How stupid could we be?

Really, why would anyone consent to be governed? Only an idiot would trade real freedom for a meaningless vote, personal autonomy for institutionalized oppression or a place in the natural world for economic servitude to corporate interests. Democracy only looks good when you compare it to tyranny. Compared to freedom, autonomy and equality, democracy is just another scam designed to dupe the stupid and insecure into subservience.

Besides failing its citizens, democracy wastes economic resources as well. The 2012 presidential election cost billions of dollars, much of which got spent on misleading negative campaign ads that nobody wanted to see. Senate and congressional races cost millions of dollars each, and even at the local and state level, many candidates spend over a million dollars to get elected. In 2012 Monsanto spent 47 million dollars to defeat a grassroots California initiative that would require foods made with genetically modified organisms to be labeled as such, outspending the citizens groups that sponsored the initiative 12 to 1.

Today, grassroots organizations capitalize on people’s disgust with our political system by raising money from ordinary citizens to “take big money out of politics”. They promote publicly funded elections, or even a constitutional amendment to “end corporate personhood”. This kind of nonsense only adds to the high cost of a worthless democracy, and discourages people from taking meaningful action to secure their own freedom and autonomy.

Lots of people have found ways to take this democracy scam to the bank. Besides the billions of dollars in campaign contributions, lots of tax dollars get spent on pointless elections that don’t solve anything. Voting machines, poll workers, election commissioners, ballots, sample ballots, polling places, signs, “I Voted” stickers all cost money. None of them do us any good.

Polling companies make big money on elections too. Campaigns hire polling companies to see how people respond to their candidate. Companies hire polling companies to see how people respond to their ads, and the media hire more polling companies so they can ignore the issues and instead report on the election as though it were a horse race.

A good polling company can tell you how any election will turn out by making 1,000 phone calls to carefully selected households. With so many polling companies asking the American people what they want or don’t want, why do we need to hold elections at all? Just take a poll. If the poll says Americans want marijuana legalized, then legalize marijuana. If the poll says Americans want genetically modified food labeled, then label the food. If the poll says Americans are disgusted with Congress, disband the Congress. Forget about turnout, likely voters, or “get out the vote” efforts, let the statisticians and supercomputers at the polling companies do something useful for a change.

Besides that, the media makes plenty of hay out of elections, with political talk shows, election coverage, and endless hours and column inches of news reporting devoted to political coverage. None of it does any good. To the media, politics is just a sport played by old rich white guys. It’s like golf, except that it’s even more boring and they use money and voters instead of clubs and a ball. They rarely tell us anything useful about the candidate or the issues, but yammer endlessly about the polls and statistics. Just like sports, the media never stops talking about it, and ultimately, none of it really matters.

Really, none of it matters; who wins, who loses, what party they’re in or who backs them. The only thing that matters is how much, and how many of us, believe in it. As long as we consent to be governed, and trade our freedom for a ballot, they’ve got us stuck in a game we can’t win.

Look at Obama’s 2008 presidential election campaign. Obama mobilized a massive grassroots movement for democratic change. His campaign built a movement that was orders of magnitude bigger than the Occupy Movement, primarily because it had orders of magnitude more money. That was a huge movement that mobilized an enormous amount of resources. How much difference did it make?

What did we get for our trouble? Obamacare, drone strikes, and wiretaps for all. Economically, that’s a lousy return on our investment. For the cost of that election, we could have ended poverty in America, and for the the amount of effort it took, we could have built enough housing to end homelessness too, but instead, we played politics and nothing got solved, and things went from bad to worse.

How many unified nationwide grassroots movements will it take to make meaningful change through the democratic system at that rate? Dozens? Hundreds? How many unified grassroots movements of the magnitude of Obama’s 2008 campaign would ever happen without the money of the 1% behind it? Not many, I’m afraid, probably none, so face facts, the democratic system is a scam, a hoax and a myth, and an expensive one at that.

I’ve witnessed five decades of lies, violence, idiocy and corruption, and for at least the last 30 years, five presidents, three Republicans and two Democrats have completely sold 99% of us out to the 1%. You’d think by now we’d realize that no matter which party they represent, what they promise, or how they talk on the campaign trail, electing politicians doesn’t solve anything.

All of the problems that I remember as a child; pollution, poverty, deforestation, overfishing and technological warfare, have only gotten worse, and we have a whole bunch of new problems, like Global Climate Change, homelessness, unaffordable health care, and an uber-class that sucks the life out of everything. That doesn’t sound to me like democracy works. It sure doesn’t feel like democracy works. It might work for somebody, if they can afford to buy themselves a piece of it, but it doesn’t work for me, or anyone I know.

I’m not saying that saying that communism or socialism or even monarchy or dictatorship would improve things, I’m saying that the only thing that all 300 million of us can agree on, is that the majority of Americans are idiots. Democracy is the process whereby we let those idiots run the country.

Yes, democracy amounts to a dictatorship of the dumb, a gulag of the gullible and a republic of the retarded. Forget about the nonsense that it takes an intelligent, informed public for democracy to succeed. Democracy succeeds by turning stupidity into power that only money can wield. It’s time to face the fact that, like communism, democracy seems like a great theory, but it really doesn’t work in reality, either.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)